by Don Wilcox
It lasted for two hours and was so full of backstabs that his own great SABA empire was figuratively bleeding to death before he got through.
“He’s preparing them for violence,” said Bobby. “They’re already mad enough to murder the heads of government.”
“He’s after Wurzelle’s scalp,” came Lord Temp’s low whisper, and with a careless snapping of bones he jogged halfway down on the stairs to sit with us. “They’ve split.”
Mountebank that he was, this master of SABA aroused his fellow fakirs to a boiling point over the nation’s dangers. Then he cracked the whip of their emotions:
“I can tell you everything because you’re all with me. You’re my fellow workers. We’re the brains of this society. We make it go and it makes our living. We see all, we make our pay customers believe all. Are you as eager as I am to keep this game in our own hands?”
The shouts of, “Yes!” roared back at him from all sixteen-hundred of his clever henchmen. He followed through.
“You don’t want to see the government grab it?”
“No!!!”
“Then listen to me. The Honorable Wurzelle has tried repeatedly to slice our profits in two.” And the tirade that followed figuratively fried Wurzelle to a cinder.
It was Wurzelle who had urged that fifty million people be lopped off. And how we needed those fifty million tonight!
“And you think they may return? No, they will not. I have learned that the mines have been filled with poison gas. Who did it? Wurzelle!”
The SABA-ites roared a violent protest.
“Temporary Death was to have been our great achievement,” Vetto shouted. “This robber who tugs at our purse strings has finished Temporary Death for us. If he is allowed to live he will finish us. A man who will commit these treacherous mass murders must be taken care of.”
The crowd had turned into a mob at white heat. Forgotten was any part Vetto might have had in helping fill the mines with gas.
Vetto added one more shovel of fuel to their fires: In the SABA predictions he’d recently found in Egypt it was foretold that not one but two leaders should be murdered when this future nation should install Temporary Death.
Lord Temp whispered to Bobby and me, “It’s been ages since I’ve bumped into such a flagrant liar. But he’s won his point.”
You can probably guess what came next, and it’s almost too dreadful to tell. This whole mad mob of charlatans clamored for action. Vetto waved them to silence. The action, he said, had already been taken and they would see the results at once.
The auditorium lights dimmed and the big screen on the wall came to life with a movie of Wurzelle’s murder. It had happened that afternoon, but the news had been withheld for this official SABA blessing.
The movie showed there had been a slight hitch in the execution of this deed. The masked men had arrived at the mines intending to toss their victim in with the poison gas behind the steel doors.
However, all the doors had been cut away as if by an electric torch—or more likely, electrical fingertips.
So instead, as the movie showed, they forced the Honorable Wurzelle into an autoplane tanker of poison gas and closed the lid over him.
At the conclusion of the movie Gravelli Vetto announced that one more SABA prophecy had been fulfilled—the results of which would be displayed in one of the side rooms immediately after this night’s meeting was adjourned—the body of Wurzelle.
The crowd cheered briefly and fell into a sullen murmuring. Their mob-spirit of a few minutes earlier had been somewhat chilled by the gruesome picture. They had been heated into sanctioning an assassination. Vetto had riveted the murder of Wurzelle to the heart of each of them; still they had been cheated of participation.
But the wily Vetto was ready for this shift in their moods:
“This act has cleared a path of wealth for each of you. We must strike while the iron is hot. Tomorrow new members will come to us by the millions. Need I remind you that new members mean increased riches?”
Vetto’s plan was simple. The new promise of SABA was that no member should ever suffer from bombs out of the sky.
“But how can we guarantee this?” some SABA promoter asked.
“The people are stupid,” Gravelli Vetto smiled contemptuously. “That is the law upon which our society prospers. Tell the people that no member will suffer bombs. Collect your fees. After that you have no further concern with any member’s fate.”
The riotous applause proved that sixteen hundred SABA charlatans were in the groove. They only regretted that the fifty million had not returned for this fleecing.
“Our promise, ‘SABA shall suffer no bomb’, has just been released to the press. Before we leave this auditorium the world will be ready to swallow our guarantee.”
Then it was that Bobbie Hammock nudged me and the three of us climbed up to the roof and touched a match to each of the piles of powder.
Lord Temp’s chariot was right on the dot. He cracked the whip and Bobbie and I hung on tight.
From a safe mile to the west and a half mile up we could look back down on the city’s only visible lights—an octagonal flower of purple flares.
Then the deadly accurate bombs dropped from some point high overhead and the big auditorium was blown to hell.
“SABA shall suffer no bombs,” said Bobbie quietly.
Lord Temp gave a low laugh. “There was no time to suffer. SABA is dead.”
CHAPTER XXVII
The Battle with King
I inquired whether Lord Temp had cut the steel doors down and he admitted the act.
“In time?” I asked.
He shrugged. His only point had been to keep the way open for chance customers who decided to take advantage of what he had to offer.
As to the poison gas, he said the temporarily dead couldn’t be bothered about that. Couldn’t he empower them to eat their way through the Rocky Mountains with their teeth or ride the heavens on raindrops if he wanted to?
I took it to be a rhetorical question, certainly not one for me to answer . . .
The next day our radios announced that our government had dissolved and that we were completely at the mercy of the invaders.
The fleet moved down on the city slowly. Most of the several thousand passengers, male and female, had been transferred to one floating doughnut, which now came to a stop directly over the government plaza, fifty yards above the gathering crowds.
Deck covers opened to reveal seated rows of these scarlet visitors looking down on us like a stadium crowd.
Our captured radio announcer spoke for them. They had taken him prisoner for a purpose. All over the city his booming voice could be heard, amplified from each of the sixty ships that now hovered over us like stationary clouds.
“I am speaking for these ships,” he said over and over. “The words I say are the words these visitors are putting in my mouth . . .
“. . . Do not be afraid. Come to the plaza, everyone, and listen.”
The city’s terrified population thronged the open spaces among the Goldfish Bowls.
“We have not come to destroy you—only those who carried destruction in their hearts,” the announcer seemed to be reading.
“We are peace loving people. In our country we work together in harmony. Our scarlet faces are forged in fire like the bright metal that gives us power. The squares of luminous white that checker our scaled hoods light our paths as we walk through our cavernous land.
“Now that we have shown you our power, remember this promise: We shall not return to molest you as long as you are ruled by men of good will.
“Have you a leader of good will who will respond to our pledge of peace?”
Instantly our multitude clamored for Prescott Barnes. He was ushered forward from our. ranks. I fought my way closer to the ruins of the Wurzelle Bowl for a better view. Coppery light from the ships’ hulls was reflected in the tens of thousands of faces that turned toward Prescott Barnes.
; Someone followed him with a microphone, others escorted him up the stairs that spiralled the nearest Bowl. When he came into view on the summit our cheers gave him a magnificent reception. This dramatic event was being relayed to the whole disillusioned nation. It was a moment for taking heart.
“I believe,” said Barnes, “that I am speaking for the American people. Soon they will elect new leaders. Until then, I shall represent them.”
In a brief speech he declared he would take these strangers at their word, adding that he saw a weird and uncanny intelligence in their choice of bomb targets; and he believed America would perceive what he perceived: that this attack, ironically enough, might prove an act of friendship. Time would tell.
Now one further request came from the scarlet invaders’ spokesman. Was there anywhere among us a king for them?
Among us a king for them?
Barnes frowned, fearing the invitation was aimed at him.
Then came Lord Temp in his chariot of death, racing like a low-flying autoplane over the heads of the multitude.
The mystified crowd gaped, and there were excited screams from many who looked up to see horses’ hoofs pounding the air directly above them.
Lord Temp leaped from the chariot to catch the long chain ladder that hung from the deck of the central ship. His horses raced on and the chariot swung out of sight among the city’s towers.
Such grace and elegance in a red-robed skeleton you’d never think to see. By Lord Temp’s very attitude, his skull tilted upward, his free arm lifting in a questioning appeal, his feet starting to ascend the ladder, he was obviously asking if he was the king they sought.
“You are the king we have awaited,” the spokesman’s voice boomed. And while we looked on in mystified silence our thousands of scarlet visitors cheered, beating their hands together to send down a skyful of thunder.
Without a spoken word Lord Temp acknowledged his appointment with many a deep bow.
Just then a harsh voice blurted through the plaza amplifiers, and the crowds turned to see where this interruption came from. I saw. It came from Leon King.
He was perched within fifteen feet of me, on the pinnacle of Wurzelle’s Goldfish Bowl ruins—a blackened sagging segment of metal stairway upthrust from the side of the bomb pit.
Leon King had a microphone in one hand, an amber-handled ray gun in the other. He was seeing no one but Lord Temp, and he sounded like a raving maniac.
“You did it! You killed my father! You’re an evil spirit, that’s what you are! I’m going to kill you!”
I can never prove that Lord Temp’s yellow visage paled as the ray gun leveled. All I know is, I surged forward like a chariot horse and plunged for Leon King. Yes, Leon, the incognito son of Wurzelle who had played Prescott Barnes for a sucker all these months.
I sprang at him, and the ruined stairway went crashing down with us, and a huddle of spectators on a lower shelf of ruins screamed and jumped out of our way. That ray gun, spraying death, cut a line close over my head and as I ducked it caught the heel of my shoe and there was a flash of burning sensations like an emery wheel against my foot.
Into the ruins we tumbled. I was punching and kicking, not to mention biting a wrist with all the savagery of my cavemen ancestors. The ray gun dropped, fell through a crevice to a lower floor.
That freed my feet and let me shout, and believe me, brother, I was shouting as fast as I was walloping.
“I should have known you the night you thumped me over the head, you—(Biff, biff!) You kept guard while your father stole from Barnes. This is for that! (Smack!) And this for threatening skeletons you don’t know anything about. (Crack!) And this for forcing your company on a swell girl like Sally.” (Pop-pop-pop! Thud!)
“Punch him, Jim! Punch him for me!”
By gollies, that voice was Sally, nobody else! She was squealing with delight, climbing down a broken shelf of ruins. She’d been taking in the whole performance from a box seat above us.
I didn’t need to punch Leon King any more. That old “chimp cage” was still in working condition, and he was in no mood to resist. It locked on him automatically. (The courts and I would see him later.)
I looked up to see the great doughnut ships were forming into a line, gliding off like a parade of balloons.
Sally clutched my arm. “Quick. My autoplane. Let’s follow.”
We shot up from the lower trafficway in time to shoot in ahead of a few thousand other parade chasers. The procession circled the city and started off toward the mountains.
Lord Temp was charioting along beneath the last ship, driving with dignity befitting a king, and his scarlet-faced subjects were still cheering him.
There was a bit of traffic on the chain ladder. Someone looking very much like Bobbie Hammock had just ascended. Now the announcer was closer, thinking to help him off—and in doing so we almost caught up with the chariot. Lord Temp, glancing back, saw me.
Chills struck through me. Lord Temp was giving me that come-hither beckon.
I looked the way. Then I looked back. Persistent cuss. He was pointing at the empty space in his chariot and motioning me to come.
Sally hadn’t seen. She had just successfully landed the announcer from the end of the ladder, no small feat now that we were picking up both speed and elevation.
The announcer was busting to talk, and the daughter of Prescott Barnes was willing to listen.
Yes, it was Sally’s brother who had just now gone up there.
“There was some scarlet-faced girl motioning to him,” the announcer said, “and she was a beauty, too. If she’d been our kind of person I’ll bet my life she’d be a knock-’em-dead blonde.
“And something else funny,” he went on. “When they had me put out that call for a king, one big fellow up there wanted the job so bad he was ready to fight. But what did his cronies do but start a card game. Right away he was in it and his face froze with one eyebrow up and the other down and he was lost to the world.”
“What puzzles me,” said Sally, “is how on earth you could understand their language. Who interpreted?”
“Between us, Miss Barnes, that’s to be a secret. I didn’t have to translate a thing. Their language is ours, slang and all. They’ve never seen Mars or Venus, if you ask me. They know America, and they had something to tell her in no uncertain terms . . .
“Don’t ask me how they worked all their tricks. They managed always to be high in the sky at daylight so no one knew where they came from. But you’ll remember some ranger reported he thought they had a base in the Rockies. I suspect their bases go deep. Just one man’s opinion, of course. Here’s my stop . . . Goodbye.”
Sally and I were alone, not quite. That grinning skeleton was still flying along in his chariot right beside us. His subjects were waving at him to come on, and the ships were picking up speed, bound for the high clouds.
Once more Lord Temp beckoned to me. Sally saw.
And she saw that I knew enough to accept a ride where I was wanted, and hadn’t forgotten that riding with her was strictly taboo.
So I started to cross over.
Sally’s hand grabbed me by the belt just as I meant to leap. I caught the autoplane door and hovered in midair and contemplated the ground a mile below.
As if to help me to make up my mind a bell sounded from a distance. I started to cross again.
“Come back here, Jim Flinders.” Sally had me by the arm and she meant it. “I’m not going to make the mistake my great-great-great-great-grand-mother made. Jim! Don’t you love me?”
Love her? I’d leaped through a century and a half just to love her. I bounced back into the seat and grabbed her and squeezed her for dear life, scared to death, I don’t mind saying, for fear some superior power was going to pull me away and whisk me off into the sky.
But when I turned my head for another glance, the chariot was racing off toward the clouds in the wake of the fleet. The grotesque old skeleton looked back, grinning, and I knew he was winking
at me out of his hollow eyes.
WORLD OF PAPER DOLLS
First published in Fantastic Adventures, October 1943
She passed the test of cutting paper dolls, and the life that came to them peopled an amazing world.
CHAPTER I
The stranger with the purple handbills came all the way up the Rocky Hill Drive to toss one of his announcements on Yolanda Lavelle’s front doorstep.
Yolanda ran to the door, but waited until the handbill man’s back was turned before she stepped out to pick up the paper. She waited because her hands were full of paper dolls and scissors; and grown-ups might laugh to see a seventeen year old girl playing with things suitable for children only.
The handbill read:
“TOLOZELL, THE SIAMESE HYPNOTIST. TONIGHT! Main Street theater. Price SO cents.”
Yolanda studied the purple picture. “Tolozell—he’s ugly!” she thought. “He’s repulsive. All that black hair around his face makes him look like an evil old goat with indigestion. And those sullen, half-closed eyes—ugh! I’d never make a paper doll from him!
. . . But he comes from Siam. And he’s a hypnotist! . . . I wonder what it feels like to be a hypnotist. I wish I could hypnotize my paper dolls.”
Yolanda ran through the castle-like mansion to show the handbill to Jolly John How, the little old bald-headed Chinese cook.
Jolly John, in spite of being very shy and very mysterious, was the best friend Yolanda ever had.
She found Jolly John at the rear porch rail looking down at the driveway. His manner was unusually nervous, and his arms jerked within the sleeves of his starchy white jacket when she showed him the handbill.
“I saw handbill man coming,” John How said, trying not to appear surprised. “Saw picture already. Always jump when I see ugly picture. Waiting for man to come back.”
“Why?” Yolanda asked.
“To test him.”
“Are you suspicious of handbill men?”
“Sluspicious when they carry handbills of sluspicious faces.”
